Vendela Vida’s The Lovers (2010) Harper Collins, 2011 Yvonne has travelled to Datça, Turkey twenty-eight years after she first visited it. Her first visit was with her husband, on their honeymoon. On her second visit, she travels there alone: her husband has died. She used to tell people that Peter
S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep HarperCollins, 2011 Don’t start reading S.J. Watson’s debut novel before you go to sleep, unless you don’t mind postponing that good night’s sleep you were anticipating. It is, as the blurbs suggest, a page-turner, and you will find it difficult – if not
Emma Donoghue's Room HarperCollins, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) I’d hoped to re-read Room before writing about it here, in the context of the Orange Prize shortlist, but I still have two fresh reads from this year’s shortlist ahead of me (The
Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love London: Faber & Faber, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Readers fall hard into Louise Doughty’s sixth novel. The emotional intensity in Whatever You Love is pervasive: even when the root of that intensity is character rather than
Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970) Putnam Publishing, 1984 In between, I forget how chilling they are. Muriel Spark novels. Somehow I mix them up with other skinny reads (like Penelope Fitzgerald novels) and other UK authors (like Penelope Lively), and they don't seem so upsetting, sitting there tidily pressed between
